Deep Sea Mining: Part 2

Before we jump into the deep water, a couple possibly irrelevant tangents:

I love the earth, am fascinated by its processes, and wish it a long and happy life.

Anybody who has opened their senses to the full spectrum of possible input — electromagnetic, socio-economic, political, religious — will likely agree that current events are becoming very confusing. There are so many competing and compelling narratives, and very few of them seem to have garnered any glimmer of universal consensus.

But it’s really so simple! I live in my camp and only listen to my tribe, and you listen only to yours. Easy peasy, lemon squeezy.

This obviously makes abundant sense, though: my side never lies and is always right, and yours is full of hooey. But — how rude! — you and yours feel exactly the same way. Sadly, this leads to the one given in this whole absurd tangle: it’s tough to craft a meeting of minds if we all follow Paul Simon’s line from The Boxer:

A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.

One of the notions that has lurked behind many of my posts is that our vision of earthtime is not a still-life photograph but a movie, and all we’re seeing is a just couple of frames (and they are all-too-often out of focus).

I’m not convinced that anything we see was made just for us, and there’s probably nothing we can do — short of completely destroying the hydrosphere — that will have a long-term negative impact on any of the fundamental planetary systems. Certainly not for much longer than a couple thousand orbits after we exit Stage Right (or Stage Left, if you prefer).

Cosmology tells us that the earth still has over five billion years before the sun starts to get weird. Couple that with how fast the biosphere can recreate itself, and the earth has many, many opportunities to completely rebuild, no matter how badly it is treated.

And if the earth is still here and still hosting life in whatever is the chosen form of the day, what can be better than that? I know my God will be satisfied…

This is one of the overarching concepts in Marker Bed — ‘the earth will be fine’ — and, at least from where I sit, brings me hope for earth’s future in the face of the storm. (If you are looking for a ray of sunshine and haven’t got your copy of Marker Bed yet, it’s not too late.)

Another issue I’ve tried to stress — it has likely been voiced far more stridently across many posts, and directly leads into this blog’s topic — is the concerns I have about what we are leaving for our children and grandchildren to fix and/or otherwise deal with.

It seems, at least to me, that one of the obligations of being a good parent — and citizen — is that you leave things better than how you found them. This covers a multitude of sins, and works not just with how we raise our kids, but with such mundane activities as camping sites and litter on a trail. Plastic waste on the beach. World peace. Sadly, I’m not convinced we’re doing all we can to leave a better world for our progeny. 

Enough with the tangents. This rant is a follow-up to an earlier blog titled “Deep Sea Mining” that I posted on 23 July 2023. We have known for quite a long time now that the deep abyssal plains are literally covered with nodules of pure metal, including such favorite raw materials as manganese, nickel, and cobalt.

These are three of the critical metals we need if we want to keep our technology and economy running, and survive a trip to the doctor or dentist (consider stainless steel, and so much more — seriously, none of us have much comprehension of just how desperately we depend on this stuff).

It seems to my simple way of thinking that if we can find a robust and secure source, free and just lying about at the bottom of the ocean, it would make abundant sense to swim down there and pick some of ’em up.

Simple man, simple thoughts (yep, just me and the Scarecrow: “If we only had a brain”).

I saw a recent article that again touched on this (New York Times, 4 June 2026). It was hidden in their Climate Forward section, and had the catchy title “How One Company Plans to Mine the Bottom of the Sea”. (Warning: The tone of this article is a subjective and one-sided look at the topic; but seafloor mining is almost certain to become ever more important as we continue to live and procreate in the closed system that is the earth.)

I leave it to you to research this topic at your leisure, but a couple quotes might help introduce a few of the authors’ main sticking points (in part this reminds me of the moral implications of drilling through Jupiter’s moon Io in A Search for Alien Life):

The industry faces major hurdles to get off the ground. Environmentalists and some scientists are appalled at the idea of meddling with fragile ocean ecosystems. Plus, most of the metal is in international waters — ostensibly shared by all of humanity — and the international community has not agreed on rules for mining there.

Recently, however, the industry caught a break. Despite the protests of many nations, the United States may soon award the first permit for commercial mining in international waters. The move is of a piece with the Trump administration’s apparent lack of concern with violating the conventions of international cooperation.

But if, for a minute, you can set aside the environmental and geopolitical concerns, what remains is a mind-blowing engineering challenge. The metal is miles below the ocean surface. At those depths, the world is utterly dark. The water pressure is hundreds of times greater than the air pressure at the surface. We have better maps of the dark side of the Moon than of the bottom of our oceans.

The authors go on to summarize the extent of their study:

We contacted The Metals Company, a firm at the forefront of the deep-sea mining industry, and asked them to share a 3-D model of their equipment. To our mild surprise, they agreed. They even took the time to walk us through how it all works.

The result is an article we published today that focuses on a real test mission the company ran a few years ago. In the article, you follow one of the world’s first deep-sea mining ships to the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, a vast area of the Pacific Ocean between Mexico and Hawaii. From there, you travel from the surface to the bottom of the sea and back up again.

Along the way, you watch as a bus-sized mining robot is lowered from the side of the ship. You see how it deploys what amounts to a miles-long industrial straw to suck metal nodules off the seafloor. And you get a glimpse of the otherworldly creatures that live in the environment where the deep-sea mining industry wishes to operate.

In several places, the main article points to this accompanying piece — titled “Inside the Quest to Mine the Bottom of the Sea” — that gives more specifics about the actual proposed procedures which will literally vacuum the nodules off the sea floor and into the economy.

In this companion article, the authors pay reference to the lifeforms that exist in the depths of the ocean:

A long time ago, people thought that nothing could possibly ever survive in the deep sea,” said Eva Stewart, a deep sea biologist at the Natural History Museum in London who joined a research expedition funded by The Metals Company. Scientists like Dr. Stewart suspect thousands of animals are waiting to be discovered. “We just haven’t seen them yet,” she said.

Those we have seen are otherworldly. A kaleidoscope of corals, sponges, worms and other animals live on the nodules themselves.

Lastly, the authors discuss some of the next steps and a few of their conclusions:

If The Metals Company and its competitors can figure out how to turn a profit, deep-sea mining could grow. The industry says that, to the extent that deep-sea mining replaces land-based mining, with its track record of environmental degradation and worker abuses, the world would be better off.

Environmentalists don’t buy that argument, saying deep-sea mining would add to, rather than replace, land-based mining. In any case, even if U.S. regulators grant licenses this year, commercial mining is most likely still years in the future. (The Trump administration has argued that deep sea mining is allowed under a 1980 act by Congress and that the United States is not party to the international Law of the Sea.)

Still, a fleet of deep sea mining ships doesn’t yet exist, and few refineries have proven capable of turning the nodules into something usable. Environmental groups are expected to challenge any U.S. license in court, while future U.S. administrations could reverse support for the industry.

I encourage you to familiarize yourself with the pros and cons of this. There are so many technological, economic, legal, moral, and ethical complications that it beggars the imagination. Sure glad it’s not up to me to make a determination!

However… no matter how this shakes out, it’s a given that we are probably going to have to get our feet wet eventually. The deposits that exist above sea level are rapidly being depleted, and our kids and grandkids have been trained to want more and more all the time. And beyond that, our consumer-driven economy is based upon them — as well as everyone else on the planet — getting all they want for as long as possible.

So yeah, I may not be worried for the long-term health of the planet, but I am concerned about the future our kids will have to navigate if they want to keep their society clickin’ along (or at least those kids who are a part of my tribe).